The Origins of European Socialism 567

tion of the state, Proudhon was

arguably the first anarchist.

Karl Marx and the Origins of “Sci­
entific Socialism”

The economic and political theorist
Karl Marx (1818-1883) also read
the utopian socialists, but although
admiring their critique of capitalist
society he found them naive and
“unscientific.” Born in 1818 in the
Rhineland, Marx studied philosophy
at the University of Berlin. When in
1843 his career as a journalist came
to an abrupt halt after his radical
newspaper ran afoul of the Prussian
government, he went to Paris. There
he read the histories of the French

After Marx lambasted the French

monarchy in a series of articles, the French police expelled him. He

befriended Friedrich Engels, the Rhineland German whose prosperous, con­

servative family owned a cotton mill in Manchester, England. Marx visited

industrial Lancashire, then the greatest concentration of industry in the

world. His observation of evolving capitalist society led him to conclude that

capitalism was but a stage in world history.

Marx applied the concept of dialectical stages of the development of ideas

and institutions, developed by the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm

Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), to the progression of world history. The

French Revolution had marked the definitive overthrow of feudal society,

represented by the power of the aristocracy and the Church; for Marx, this

was a bourgeois revolution. Just as the nobility and the bourgeoisie had bat­

tled in the eighteenth century, so the victorious bourgeoisie, who controlled

the means of production (capital, raw materials, and equipment needed to

produce goods), and the proletariat were in the process of fighting it out in

the middle decades of the nineteenth century. English commercial capital­

ism had brought the bourgeoisie to power, which in turn had facilitated the

growth of industrial capitalism. By creating a proletariat, however, capital­

ists had sown the seeds of their demise. Inevitably, socialism would replace

capitalism when the proletariat seized power. The end of private property

and pure communism would follow.

But that moment, Marx thought, lay in the future, awaiting the further

concentration of capitalism and the development of a larger, class-conscious

Revolution and the utopian social­

ists.

Proudhon destroying property as seen

by a hostile caricaturist.